filmmakers – American Mastershttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters
A series examining the lives, works, and creative processes of outstanding artists.Thu, 08 Dec 2016 21:51:12 +0000en-UShourly1https://wordpress.org/?v=4.6.1 Woody Allen vs Manhattanhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/woody-allen-a-documentary-clip-woody-allen-vs-manhattan/1913/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/woody-allen-a-documentary-clip-woody-allen-vs-manhattan/1913/#disqus_threadThu, 10 Nov 2011 22:03:36 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/?p=1913The post Woody Allen vs Manhattan appeared first on American Masters.
]]>After critical success of Manhattan, Woody’s emotions about his celebrated film are conflicted. Woody Allen: A Documentary premieres nationally Sunday, November 20 from 9-11 p.m. and Monday, November 21 from 9-10:30 p.m. on PBS (check local listings) as part of the 25th anniversary season of American Masters.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/woody-allen-a-documentary-clip-woody-allen-vs-manhattan/1913/feed/4 Interview with filmmaker Gail Levinhttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/jeff-bridges-the-dude-abides-interview-with-filmmaker-gail-levin/1800/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/jeff-bridges-the-dude-abides-interview-with-filmmaker-gail-levin/1800/#disqus_threadMon, 07 Mar 2011 21:16:17 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/?p=1800The post Interview with filmmaker Gail Levin appeared first on American Masters.
]]>Levin discusses what it was like working with the legendary actor, whose appeal, she points out, spans the generations. An Academy Award winner, Bridges is also an accomplished musician, painter, and photographer.

What was Jeff Bridges’ reaction to American Masters’ decision to make a film about him?

Gail Levin: One of the main points in the film is his reticence to take on projects all the time. So, I don’t think this one is really different for him. But, the twofold of it is that he’s always a little hesitant and he’s always a little bit halting, but once he’s in, he’s in. I think that can be said about this. I think that he was not sure what this meant – when you put this kind of a magnifying glass on somebody, it makes them feel a little awkward. But, having said that, I think he also just decided to get out of the way of it and let it be. So, I would say that’s how he approached it and that’s how I approached it as well – to not be in his way about it, but let him realize that this is his story.

Was there anything that you were surprised to learn about him during the making of the film?

GL: I was surprised to learn that what seems to be an easygoing guy is kind of a guy who frets a bit. He appears to be so easy and “dude-ish” in a way, but he’s not that laid back. He’s not uptight, be he’s intense and he thinks about things…it’s not an easy task for him to just give over to it. In the film, Mercedes Ruehl made this statement about how she felt that there was a sort of melancholy about him – then in the next part of the statement she said, she felt he was not a stranger to sadness. And I think there’s something about that that’s true – there’s another side to him. There is a joyfulness and a kidding around, but I think there is also a part of him that is very thoughtful, very pensive, and a bit darker – a bit more complex than you might expect. He’s not a guy you can take at face value at all.

What was the most challenging part of making this film?

GL: Exactly the same things! I didn’t know him at all, and we had a very short window to make the film in. That was both good and bad. I think it would be very hard to take on a film with somebody that you know well. That’s never a good idea. But also, you have to have time to build some sort of trust with someone and have the feeling that they know you’re going to be okay with them and that you feel that they’re going to be okay with you. We had very little time to establish that. The producers on this film – Neil Koenigsberg, Nikki Silver, Orly Wiseman – they’d worked with him for some time trying to do a feature film on a young adult book called The Giver. They know him very well, but I didn’t know him at all. But I think based on him knowing them, he was willing to assume that I was okay for this. Hopefully, that all worked out. Still, he and I didn’t have a relationship. Luckily enough on my end, I’ve watched his films all my life, so I knew his body of work, which was a big plus. But I was not an intimate of his at all, so there was a little bit of that – he had to sort of decide if I was okay, I had to hope he thought I was okay. It’s nervous making to do these things! What’s also good is that I didn’t develop a crush on him. (Laughs)

Bridges not only acts, but also is a musician, artist and accomplished photographer. How much of this is this reflected in the film?

GL: It is. He’s extremely talented, and not just as an actor. I think he himself had hoped that he would be a musician – music is not something that just came with Crazy Heart. He’s played guitar since he was a kid, and loves it. So that was something to learn, because I always just thought – he’s a great actor, and he was able to learn enough guitar to really pull it off in Crazy Heart. I didn’t realize the extent of his love for music and how much he played and how much a part of his life that had always been. So, it’s really his double muse, music and acting. I think what he loves now and what is extremely wonderful about having won an Oscar for Crazy Heart is, he wins the Oscar playing a part of something he always wanted to be, which is a musician. He’s also got a little band now and does some public appearances, and I think that bridging (pardon the pun) of the loves in his life is nice.

In his paintings, he’s really rather Picasso-esque – he’s very free and fluid. It’s beautiful stuff. We devised to do this plexiglass idea in the film, which is from Picasso. I’ve always wanted to duplicate it, and he was the perfect person to do it with; he really got into it, which was fun.

You have directed and produced a number of shows for THIRTEEN, including previous American Masters films on Marilyn Monroe and James Dean. What first drew you to documentary film making and public television?

GL: For me, the arts are just an endless source of intelligence, brilliance, imagination, and originality. How people do what they do is so fascinating to me. I think it’s mysterious; it’s not something people can explain to you. So, if there’s some way to hang around, get some access, and get some ability to watch some of what happens, I think that’s very compelling stuff and we’re lucky if we can see some of that. I think the beauty of documentary work is that it’s a mystery too – you never know where it’s going to lead you. You start out with some notion of it, but it’s very different from a script. A script you write, you shoot against, and you know what the story is going to be. There’s always the element of surprise, but the surprise comes from performance, from something that’s improvised, it comes from someone who sees it inside an already determined framework. In documentary, it’s never determined. It’s never the same, and affords enormous possibility.

Is there anything else about the film you would like viewers to know?

GL: I would love people to know about John Goodman’s interview. In The Big Lebowski, John Goodman was hilarious, but he was a little bit hard to interview – he came in a little guarded. We started talking and all of a sudden, he started to laugh about Lebowski, about the character and about Jeff’s performance – he started to laugh in that way you laugh as a little kid, you start giggling and then you can’t stop. So we started laughing, but we didn’t want it to get picked up on the track…but I also wanted to keep him laughing. It was great!

Another thing I’m sorry didn’t happen was that we missed getting in one of Jeff’s friends since the 4th grade. Jeff has very long friendships. And these are not with movie stars – I’m sure he has those as well, but these are friends that he’s very loyal to, they’re very loyal to him, they still hang out…it’s very cool, and I’m sorry that that didn’t get enough real play in the film. He also has a strong family life, which we didn’t get to show enough of.

One other thing we didn’t get to do enough with is Jeff’s charitable and humanitarian work. He’s been working now with a group called No Kid Hungry, and I know he’s very strongly advocating to be sure that children eat in this country – there are hungry children on a level that we would not believe here.

What is your favorite Jeff Bridges film?

GL: My favorite Jeff Bridges film, aside from Lebowski – which is just a masterpiece – is Cutter’s Way… it is a small, noir-ish film, from the early ’80’s, and it is superb. Aside from that, my next favorite is The Fisher King, also because I adore Terry Gilliam, the director.

Peter Raymont: As a child growing up in the 50’s and 60’s in Canada’s capital city, Ottawa, Glenn Gould’s music was always in our home – on radio, on gramophone records my parents had – and my mum and Dad loved playing the piano. One of my earliest memories is waking up to the sound of my father playing the piano. I took lessons of course but often resented having to practice while my friends were outside playing football or hockey. So Glenn Gould, and Marshal McLuhan, were very much part of my consciousness as a young Canadian boy.

As a filmmaker I thought that all the films about Glenn Gould that could be made, had been made. There were the two National Film Board of Canada classics, Glenn Gould On the Record and Glenn Gould Off the Record, and there was Francois Girard’s popular Thirty-two Short Films About Glenn Gould, and several others. But then I met Michael Clarkson, a journalist with The Toronto Star newspaper, who had just interviewed Cornelia Foss, wife of the great American composer, Lucas Foss. Cornelia told of her long love affair with Gould, how she separated with her husband and moving to Toronto with her two children to marry Gould. I met Cornelia in New York who agreed to be interviewed for our film. That convinced me that there was a whole other film to be made about Glenn Gould, revealing for the first time his personal, private life, but done in a respectful, non-prurient way.

Michele Hozer: When I was approached by Peter Raymont to co-direct, I immediately agreed because I knew Gould would, like all good mythical figures, be a fascinating, complex and contradictory character to explore. At the same time, there was something about Gould that made him the classic tragic hero. Through him one can explore the greatest virtues in humanity, but also the darkest of fears and flaws—in other words, that which makes us fundamentally human, in all our triumphs and frailties.

When did you first become aware of Glenn Gould?

Peter Raymont: Glenn Gould was part of my consciousness from the beginning of my life (see above), but I only knew of his extraordinary skills as a pianist and interpreter of Bach, and as a reclusive, though handsome genius. Gould’s inner life was a mystery.

Michele Hozer: When I originally learned that Peter Raymont was developing a film about Gould, I, like most Canadians knew the standard shorthand about this cultural icon: great pianist, but a rather odd and shadowy personality. I owned a copy of the Goldberg Variations and was a fan of “32 Short Films about Glenn Gould.” But, frankly, I knew little about Gould the man, even if I had an interest in him as an almost mythical character.

While making the film, did you learn anything that surprised you about the subject?

Peter Raymont: It was wonderful to talk with Cornelia Foss’s children, Eliza and Christopher and discover what a wonderful father-figure he was for them when they lived near him in Toronto for four years. He loved children, and animals, but sadly never had children of his own. It was also wonderful to be able to see that, while he was undoubtedly a musical genius, he was also very much an “ordinary” man who was desperate to be loved and to love others.

Michele Hozer: What surprised me the most about Glenn Gould was his wonderful sense of humour. Not necessarily something you expect from a classical musician. Gould was a type of character who loved to put on costumes and play different characters with funny voices. As his biographer Kevin Bazzana puts it “. . . he provides some relief from the conservatism of the classic music business.”

Are there any interesting anecdotes about the filming or the interviewees?

Peter Raymont: It was wonderful how people opened their hearts to us and wanted to share their most intimate stories of Gould. Michele did almost all the interviews.

Michele Hozer: One interesting outcome of this film is meeting Cornelia Foss’ children Christopher and Eliza Foss and learning of their relationship with Gould. When they were young children they spent 4 years in Toronto with their mother and Glenn. Both Christopher and Eliza speak very fondly and warmly about their time with Gould showing us a side of him know one ever knew. One that was generous and caring of young children, which makes Glenn even more endearing.

Please describe your approach to the film.

Peter Raymont: We wanted to peel back the layers of artiface and spin that Gould and his handlers had constructed around him, and find the real human being beneath all that glitter and hype.

Fortunately Gould kept a diary and letters which were revelatory and fortunately some of his most intimate friends were ready to speak to us. Michele co-directed and edited the film and found a way to weave the vast array of archival footage with interviews and music into a lively tapestry that moves along at a good pace for 112 minutes.

Michele Hozer: Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould uses an array of archival material, TV footage, film clips, musical performances, and original footage and interviews to celebrate Gould’s art and life. It is a celebration of the diverse body of work he produced and a study of the genius behind the man who always expressed himself in layers. Gould himself is the guide, with insights from those closest to him, leading us through the labyrinth of thoughts, dreams, and desires of a true enigma.

Gould’s most intimate friends have chosen this opportunity to address the myths and misconceptions that have built up around the indomitable pianist. These charismatic characters recount their vivid memories of Gould and we gain a unique perspective into the life of such an intensely private man. Apart from Gould himself, no one else is better able to shed light on his fears, aspirations, and dreams than those who lived beside him and worked with him.

What were some of the obstacles in achieving your vision of the film?

Peter Raymont: Fundraising is always an obstacle to the creation of a feature-length theatrical documentary. Fortunately there are broadcasters like BRAVO in Canada, PBS-American Masters in the U.S., ARTE and SVT in Europe and other sources of private and public funds in Canada that made it possible.

Once the funding is in place, the major obstacle was finding the through-line that would hold all the rich archive footage together. Michele Hozer is a master editor and storyteller, and she did an extraordinary job.

Michele Hozer: From the beginning, it was a challenging undertaking. Gould has not one but five biographies, with others in the works. Also, since his death in 1982, there has been numerous film exploring his life and achievements. So, the basic question: what do we have to offer that’s new? Why yet another film about Gould?

Like Gould himself, the answer is complex. At the heart of it all, Gould is a great human story. By intimately looking at the man along side the myth, not only do we understand a bit more about Gould, we can all understand a bit more about ourselves, about our society. We can all relate to wanting to achieve success, to make our lasting mark in some fashion, but is there a human cost, a personal sacrifice, and is it ultimately worth it all? No simple answers but fundamental and worthy existential questions to ponder.

Gould often talked about the transcendental nature of music; maybe by losing ourselves in his music and his story, we can better find ourselves, or that’s my hope.

Please describe your background credits, how maybe they led to this film.

Peter Raymont: I’ve been making documentary films for 39 years, initially as an editor working at the National Film Board of Canada and then with my own company, which I founded 32 years ago. Most of my films have been in the area of human rights and social justice (Shake Hands with the Devil, chronicled the horrific days of the Rwanda genocide through the eyes and experiences of the commander of the UN peacekeeping troops, and was awarded the Emmy for Best Documentary). But as I get older (age 60 this year), I find myself attracted to making films about artists, and others who stretch the limits of human potential.

Michele Hozer: A good filmmaker is ultimately a great storyteller.

As a documentary editor for over 20 years I have been very fortunate to work on films that were made in the edit room.

Unlike fiction films, a documentary editor does not work with a script. Usually the editor has hundred of hours of footage to go through, and slowly, often painfully, the story is found.

In some way, the transition from editor to director was a natural transition. In fact, my co-director Peter Raymont also started his stellar career as an editor.

Together we have worked on films such as Shake Hands with The Devil: The Journey of Romeo Dallaire and A Promise to the Dead: The Exile Journey of Ariel Dorfman, whose characters and experiences offered us a wealth of material with which to craft important and universal stories.

Throughout his career as an actor and a filmmaker, Clint Eastwood has practiced a policy of alternation, seldom repeating a tone, a character, or a genre two films in a row.

He follows “Dirty Harry,” the 1971 urban thriller that was his breakthrough to superstar status, with the 1972 “High Plains Drifter,” a defiant return to the Western genre that had given him his start with “Rawhide” and the Sergio Leone films.

He follows the broad slapstick comedy of “Every Which Way But Loose” (1978) with “Escape from Alcatraz,” a terse, tightly focused Don Siegel film that features perhaps Eastwood’s most introverted performance. And he is always careful to follow a personal film, such as 1982’s “Honkytonk Man,” with a more obviously commercial project, such as “Sudden Impact,” as if he were following John Ford’s old survival technique — making one film for himself, one film for his studio.

But the most significant division in Eastwood’s work lies between the collective, community oriented films — the celebrations of family and belonging, such as “Bronco Billy” and “The Outlaw Josey Wales” — and his studies of reclusive, unfathomable figures like Mitchell Grant in “Firefox,” Charlie Parker in “Bird,” Wes Block in “Tightrope,” or Dirty Harry in all of his incarnations (except, tellingly, for his final, self-parodying appearance in “The Dead Pool,” where he is allowed finally to become part of a group).

As an artist, Eastwood is divided between these extremes of human existence, never definitively choosing one over the other. The warm glow of community is balanced by the cool breeze of individualism, just as the fear of loneliness is weighed against the resentment of compromise and the burden of unwanted responsibility that are the consequences of social commitment.

This dialogue continues through Eastwood’s most recent films. Luther Whitney in “Absolute Power” (1997) is drawn into reconciliation with his estranged daughter, and turns his skill as a criminal — a cat burglar who always works alone — to working for the public good (the salvation of American democracy, no less). But Steve Everett in “True Crime”(1999) loses his wife and baby daughter, even as he fights successfully to save the life of a man unjustly convicted of murder; at the film’s climax, he is a lonely figure disappearing into the shadows of a shopping mall.

The continuing fascination of Eastwood’s work comes in part from his refusal to make a clear-cut moral choice between social commitment and personal independence. Both options are viewed as equally valid and equally fulfilling — an unusual and provocative position in a film culture where collective values are almost invariably championed over individualism.

Yet it is here that Eastwood approaches one of the fundamental contradictions of American life, the conflict between democratic collectivism and capitalist egoism. If Eastwood remains impossible to pin down ideologically — despite the facile charges of “fascism” he faced in the 1970s — it’s because he has never forced these values into tidy, artificial reconciliation. The ambivalence runs deep in Eastwood’s work, just as it does in American life.

“Bronco Billy” (1980) is Eastwood’s most optimistic film, a utopian vision of a ragtag community of outsiders and misfits, united by their commitment to the outdated heroic ideals of B westerns. Eastwood himself has described it as his “Capra” film, and it shares Capra’s sense of small town values as the antidote to the soulessness and indifference of big business and big government.

Unlike Capra, however, Eastwood acknowledges that this vision is a childish fantasy — Bronco Billy confesses that he is actually a former shoe salesman from New Jersey who always dreamed of being a cowboy — that poses no real challenge to the established order (neatly symbolized by the train that blithely speeds by, oblivious to the pathetic attempt of Billy and his band to stop and rob it). It is no longer possible to return to these naïve ideals, except at the expense of delusion and regression; Billy and his fellow travelers are portrayed as overgrown children adrift in a world of adults, able at best to find themselves a small, safe corner where they can live out their little dreams.

“Bronco Billy,” like the more complex and mature “The Outlaw Josey Wales,” is structured as a series of additions; new members are accepted into the group, each bringing a particular skill that benefits the community, each representing another subgroup of the socially excluded (among them, significantly, blacks, Indians, women and the elderly). The group is completed when Billy seals his relationship with Miss Lily (Sondra Locke), a skeptical, runaway heiress who is the film’s representative of adult, establishment values; by winning her over, Billy has triumphed, if only temporarily, over reality.

After “Bronco Billy,” Eastwood starred in “Any Which Way You Can,” a sequel to his immensely successful blue-collar comedy “Every Which Way But Loose,” in which his co-star was an orangutan named Clyde. The “monkey movies,” as Eastwood calls them, share the populist values and communal sentiments of “Billy” but avoid its sentimentality and self-consciousness, choosing instead a more vulgar, brawling, anarchic spirit.

Eastwood did not sign his name to either of the monkey movies (the director’s credit went to his long time stunt director, Buddy Van Horn), perhaps an indication that he considered them commercial projects designed to compensate Warner Brothers for accepting the risks of his more personal films. He did, however, sign his next project, “Firefox” (1982), an apparently commercial project (based on a popular novel and packed with “Star Wars”-style special effects) that is actually one of Eastwood’s most personal and eccentric works.

“Firefox” is the anti-“Bronco Billy,” a cold, unyielding film structured as a series of exclusions and escapes. The hero, Mitchell Gant, is perhaps the isolated of Eastwood’s many loners — a former fighter pilot in Vietnam, he has been living in seclusion in the wilderness, haunted by his war experiences and by a particular memory of a young girl burned in a Napalm attack. Gant, in fact, barely seems to exist apart from his one traumatic memory, which Eastwood returns to in repeated, nightmarish flashbacks.

Just as “Bronco Billy” proceeds as a series of additions, “Firefox” is built as a series of subtractions. Gant is slowly stripped of the few elements of social identity he possesses: sent to the Soviet Union a mysterious military agency to steal the prototype of a new, supersonic fighter jet that can defeat radar detection, he is first asked to assume the disguise of an American businessman, then as a Russian worker, and finally as the Soviet fighter pilot who is his opposite number.

As he moves along the stages of his mission, virtually everyone he comes in contact with is killed or sacrificed. His features disappear, first behind a false moustache and a pair of too large glasses; later, and more completely, behind the smoked glass visor of the fighter pilot’s helmet. Dressed in the orange flight suit of the Soviet pilot, he has become physically indistinguishable from him, but this is still not enough. The plane, “Firefox,” is controlled though a futuristic technology that translates the pilot’s thoughts into commands; in order to fly it successfully, Gant must think in Russian, thus giving up the last vestige of his American identity, his private thoughts.

Gant succeeds in stealing the plane, but is pursued by a Russian pilot flying another prototype. He is being chased by his exact double, and the only means of escape is to destroy his pursuer, which means, in effect, destroying himself. At the moment he launches the fatal rocket against his adversary, he is blocked by his memory of the Vietnamese girl; only by definitively repressing it, pushing it completely out of his mind, is he able to think the purely Russian thought that would activate the plane’s defense system.

In purging the memory, he loses every last trace of his self, destroying both his double and any remaining traces of individuality he might still possess. And yet, the film presents this as a happy ending. In the final shot, Gant is reduced to a tiny dot on the screen as he flies away into the distance. Eastwood does not give us the expected triumphant climax, with the plane landing and Gant being applauded by his peers; the triumph, instead, lies in Gant’s final evaporation, in his liberation from himself.

“Honkytonk Man,” Eastwood’s second film of 1982, is another story of disappearance, though this time it is couched in far more humanist terms. The memory theme of “Firefox” is here recycled as nostalgia — nostalgia for a bucolic America of the 1930s, where the poverty produced by the Great Depression seems to serve mainly to bring people together.

Eastwood invested many of his own childhood memories in “Honkytonk Man” — his family, like the family unit in the film, spent much of the 1930s in constant motion, as Eastwood’s father traveled up and down the California coast in search of work. In the film, the family becomes loose, improvised family unit composed of Red Stovall, a gifted but self-destructive country singer (Eastwood), his nephew Whit (played by Eastwood’s son Kyle), and Whit’s grandfather (John McIntire). Whit joins up with Red to escape the suffocating confines of his own family, where he will be doomed to life as a sustenance farmer; he hopes that throwing in with Red will mean adventure and the open road, a chance to create his own identity.

Instead, Whit finds that freedom can mean a life without structure, meaning or human connections. One of the many troubled portraits of artists in the Eastwood canon (“Sudden Impact,” “Bird,” “Escape from Alcatraz,” the episode “Vanessa in the Garden” that Eastwood directed for Spielberg’s TV series, “Amazing Stories”), Red is introverted, taciturn, self-devouring (tendencies represented by the tuberculosis that is eating out his lungs), and is able to communicate only through the medium of his music.

The film’s one moment of group unity is a highly Hawksian sequence in which Red composes the title song riding in the backseat of a car while Grandpa plays the harmonica and Whit contributes a few lines of lyrics. But far more often, Red is a divisive figure who threatens the group with his drunkenness and irresponsibility. His one regret in life is the “raw-boned Oakie girl,” Mary, he seduced away from her husband and then abandoned when she became pregnant; in his boozier moments he allows himself to remember her and try to imagine what his life might have been like if he had stayed with her on a farm.

Like Mitchell Gant, Red Stovall seems to lose pieces of himself as he moves through space; finally, he loses his voice during a crucial audition for the Grand ‘Ol Opry, which costs him his last chance of stardom. Unlike Gant, Red occasionally reaches out, both to Whit and to the woman, Marlene (Alexa Kenin), who renews Mary’s promise of romantic redemption.

Though he is unable to follow through on these gestures, Red does leave something behind when he dies: Whit receives his guitar, and with it, implicitly, his gift for music; Marlene discovers she is pregnant, and perhaps the baby will be Red reborn in a more appropriately dependent form, as the helpless child he has never ceased to be.

“Honkytonk Man” finally eludes both the sentimentality of “Bronco Billy” and the iciness of “Firefox” to establish a somewhat murky middle territory. If it is not as distinctive a work as the other two films, it does clarify the link between them. Intentionally or not, “Bronco Billy,” “Firefox” and “Honkytonk Man” end by forming a trilogy on theme of connection and disconnection, of joining and escaping.

“Sudden Impact,” which followed “Honkytonk Man” in 1983, was no doubt intended to be a potboiler spaced between more personal projects: the fourth “Dirty Harry” film, the project reportedly originated with the Warner Brothers brass and was pressed on a reluctant Eastwood. But in the execution, the film becomes one of Eastwood’s richest works; it is perhaps his neglected masterpiece, a strange, poetic, supremely dark film that achieves a kind of cosmic perspective through its use of bold, primal symbols: the sea, the night, the Unicorn.

Mitchell Gant of “Firefox” met and destroyed his double, and in the process, liberated himself. The Harry Callahan of “Sudden Impact” will have a similar experience, meeting himself in female form as the “Dirty Harriet” played by Sondra Locke, though the outcome is radically different. Locke’s character, Jennifer Spencer, is an artist divided against herself: at night, she paints tortured, expressionistic self-portraits, which she shows in a San Francisco gallery; during the daylight hours, she is a professional restorer of merry-go-round horses, which she brightens and brings back to life.

But Jennifer’s real business in life is seeking revenge for the gang rape she and her younger sister suffered beneath a boardwalk in the California resort town of San Paulo. With her sister in a permanent traumatic coma, Jennifer has tracked down the men who participated in the rape and has begun killing them one by one, shooting them in the genitals and then in the head.

The Harry Callahan of “Sudden Impact” has mellowed considerably since “Dirty Harry.” Though he still carries on his one-man war against the scum of San Francisco, he is less liable to employ indiscriminate violence. He is now a tightly controlled, almost emotionless figure, who uses language, not bullets, to assassinate a crime boss who has eluded legal prosecution (breaking into the man’s daughter’s wedding, he threatens him convincingly enough to give the man a heart attack).

When Harry is attacked by a group of the crime boss’s vengeful bodyguards, Eastwood contrasts their sloppy, excessive violence — they pump a few hundred rounds of automatic weapon fire into a dumpster in which they think Harry is hiding — against the detective’s pinpoint accuracy and perfect control (the three hoods require precisely three bullets). If his rage is still there, it is now disciplined and focused; his crusade against the “scum of the city” is no longer personal, but something professional and detached, institutionalized and permanent.

He now embodies the law as a theoretical, rational force, rather than as a passionate avenger.

Sent from San Francisco to San Paulo to investigate the first of Jennifer’s castration killings, Harry meets on a jogging path without knowing that she is the murderer; he picks her up again in an outdoor restaurant, and they bond over their shared sense of the inadequacy of the legal system (“I bet you’re tired of hearing that” “Actually, I don’t hear it enough”). But what seems at first to be common ground — has Harry actually found a love interest, to replace the long-dead wife whose murder, pre-“Dirty Harry,” touched off his rage? — turns out to be another gulf of separation. He believes in revenge, Harry says, until it breaks the law.

Harry is all retention, repression, control — like the law itself, he is inflexible and distant, a dispassionate instrument of justice. Jennifer’s rage is personal, but it also has a timeless, ancient quality. She seems to be standing in for all of the women, from “Coogan’s Bluff” to “High Plains Drifter,” who were raped in Eastwood films, sometimes for comic effect. Unlike Harry’s, her violence is not focused and disciplined, but excessive (the unnecessary second shot) and impulsive. Eastwood plays with the traditional “justice is blind” imagery by emphasizing shots of himself wearing absurdly large, wrap-around sunglasses; Locke, on the other hand, is generally shot with an emphasis on her huge, watery eyes, which almost seem ready to burst from her head. The portraits she paints of herself are all eyes and mouth, screaming cavities at once vulnerable and horrifying.

“Sudden Impact” brings Harry 180 degrees from his original incarnation. He is now the standard-bearer of social values, of law and order over open warfare. Jennifer is the old Harry, and he recognizes her and is frightened by her. Eastwood consistently associates water imagery with Jennifer (the rape takes place by the sea, as do most of her revenge killings), linking her to forces that are large, ancient, fecund and traditionally female. Harry has been given nothing better than a newer, bigger Magnum to port around, just another tin-toy penis in a world that already seems full of them.

Harry is stripped of his gun and pitched into the ocean by the thugs Jennifer is searching for; he is left for dead but (in what has become a favorite Eastwood image) is symbolically reborn when he pulls himself out of the water and emerges on shore. From this point on in the film, he shares in Jennifer’s passion.

The great chase and gun battle that follows ends with the principle heavy impaled on the horn of a wooden unicorn — a traditional symbol of virginity that also has obvious phallic overtones. The imagery is hopelessly confused, as is Harry — who, now aware of Jennifer’s guilt, impulsively decides to protect her from prosecution. Perhaps this is love, or at least as close as Dirty Harry is able to come to it. But whatever it is, it has required Harry to abandon his most sacred principle — that murder must be punished — and let a perpetrator walk away. His communal values have become irrevocably personal.

The film’s final image is a helicopter shot of the bay surrounding the amusement pier where the final confrontation takes place — a phallic promontory dwarfed by the immensity of the ocean. There is a sense of provisional reconciliation, of a fragile, temporary peace — a peace that Harry has achieved by abandoning his principles and with them, his sense of himself.

As a benumbed Harry leads Jennifer away at the end of the film it is difficult to believe that this relationship has much of a future (it feels almost regressive, as if Harry had taken up with the equally vengeful, equally psychotic Evelyn Draper (Jessica Walter) of Eastwood’s first film as a director, “Play Misty for Me” (1971). For Eastwood, who fully intended “Sudden Impact” to be the last of the “Dirty Harry” films (before he was coaxed into making “The Dead Pool” in 1988), this must have seemed a fittingly final farewell to the character. Harry has finally been beaten, not by a criminal, but by a more ferocious, more feral, more female version of himself. Once again, an Eastwood hero vanishes into the darkness.

]]>http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/clint-eastwood-eastwood-noir/582/feed/9 About Martin Scorsesehttp://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/martin-scorsese-about-martin-scorsese/699/
http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/martin-scorsese-about-martin-scorsese/699/#disqus_threadSat, 08 May 2004 15:58:17 +0000http://www.pbs.org/wnet/americanmasters/?p=699The post About Martin Scorsese appeared first on American Masters.
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From the violent realism of MEAN STREETS, TAXI DRIVER, and RAGING BULL to the poignant romance of ALICE DOESN’T LIVE HERE ANY MORE, the black comedy of AFTER HOURS, and the burning controversy of THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, Martin Scorsese’s uniquely versatile vision has made him one of the cinema’s most acclaimed directors.

Martin Scorsese was born in Flushing, New York in 1942. A quiet child with a strong case of asthma, Scorsese spent much of his young life alone— in the movie theater or watching movies on television. After attending high school in the Bronx he spent a year in the seminary before enrolling at New York University. The early 1960s was a time of renewed interest in American film, and he found himself drawn to NYU’s film school, where the emerging French and Italian New Wave and independent filmmakers such as John Cassavetes had a profound influence on him.

Soon after graduating he became a film instructor at NYU and made commercials in both England and the United States. He also finished his first full-length feature in 1968, WHO’S THAT KNOCKING AT MY DOOR? He followed this with a number of hard-hitting films throughout the 1970s. His style combined a rough and gritty attention to the everyday life of the urban jungle with a monumental visual sensibility. In one of his most famous films, TAXI DRIVER (1976), Scorsese focused on the particulars of an individual and his obsessions. Starring Robert DeNiro (with whom Scorsese has had one of the most celebrated collaborative relationships in American cinema), TAXI DRIVER elevates the obscure specifics of a disturbed life with the greatest drama.

With two later films, RAGING BULL (1980) and THE KING OF COMEDY (1983) (both starring De Niro), Scorsese focused on a theme that has permeated nearly every one of his movies—the plight of the desperate and out-of-control individual. Often unsympathetic, his characters display a crazed violence that mimics the repressive social structures in which they live. With the protagonist in RAGING BULL we find a fighter possessed with anger both in and out of the ring, while in THE KING OF COMEDY we find one overwhelmed by the impossibility of breaking into the entertainment industry. Both are telling social commentaries and engaging films.

Emotionally precise and visually overpowering, Scorsese creates lush landscapes in which every detail seems to pulse with energy. In his 1988 masterpiece THE LAST TEMPTATION OF CHRIST, Scorsese used this elevation of the particular to present both Jesus and everything around him with a fullness required by such a loaded topic. The controversial nature of the film and the stunning visual reality it created stirred up Hollywood and met with strong reactions from the general public.

In 1995’s CASINO, Scorsese brought together much of the stylistic and theoretical content of his earlier works. The engaging world and controlling power structure of the Mafia (a source repeatedly tread by Scorsese) is brought to life in the loud and visually stunning world of the casino. In tone, style, and content, Scorsese is constantly pushing the boarders of the film, seeing how much we can come to feel about the most foreign and familiar characters. For many, Martin Scorsese is the most important living American filmmaker—one whose relentless search for the furthest emotional reaches of his genre have led him to the center of the American psyche.